Foul Lady Fortune

If Celia missed anything about Shanghai, it was the marketplaces. Out here, in the more rural parts of the country, the selection was pitiful—only the most common vegetable types, each variety smaller than average.

“Be glad there’s food at all,” Celia mumbled to herself, sifting through the qīngcài bunches. Once she found one that wasn’t as yellowed as the rest, she brushed the dampness off her hand and hauled her shopping bag higher up her shoulder. The morning was rising slowly, drawing the wash of dawn over the rickety stalls. There were only three other townspeople at the open market this early, so she took her time walking around, her flat shoes padding down on the rough dirt ground. Her wardrobe choices were entirely transformed while she was undercover, and then toned down even further whenever she was outside the shop. Cloth and cotton fabrics even if she was wearing a qipao. No silk, and certainly no designed lace.

Celia’s gaze flickered up, watching two new shoppers enter the marketplace. She went alert immediately, entertaining the possibility that this was an agent pair, but then they parted at the entranceway, as if their side-by-side appearance had been mere coincidence. Overhead, a bead of water dripped along a stall and landed with a splat on Celia’s shoulder.

She turned to the seller and paid, hurrying to leave. It wouldn’t do good to dawdle, not knowing what sort of people could come sniffing around. She was still on edge after seeing the soldiers at that warehouse. Though she and Oliver had gotten away, though they had returned to the shop and shut the door to silence, waiting and waiting for a sign of pursuit and hearing nothing, it didn’t mean they were in the clear, especially not after one of the soldiers had been injured by Oliver’s bullet.

She had spoken very little to Oliver since that night. It wasn’t that things had soured between them—Celia was too much of a people pleaser to ever manage sour. All the same, she didn’t linger long in the rooms he entered, didn’t seek him out when there wasn’t any need. If she was around him too much, she would be tempted to shake him by the shoulders until he divulged every secret he was keeping from her, and that probably wouldn’t go down well. Oliver had to come clean on his own terms for it to mean something.

If that’s even possible. Celia had never been very good at making demands. Something about it had always felt fundamentally wrong to her; she could never rid herself of the feeling that being difficult would drive people away. Still, on this, she needed to stand firm.

Celia glanced over her shoulder. The two new shoppers remained at the market as she exited. Good. It was only her paranoia then. Just to be safe, she still chose a different route back to the shop, walking the longer main road through the town.

She passed a dress shop. Then halted in her step.

To her left, there were three metal-lined newspaper stands, laid out with a cover in case of rain. Oliver had said he’d picked up that issue of Seagreen Press near a dress shop. Was this the one? The displays remained nearly full. When Celia walked up to the stacked piles and did a preliminary flip through the topmost issues, it looked as if they were updated weekly, which meant nothing should have been changed since Oliver was last here.

Celia dropped to a delicate crouch. For good measure, she sorted through each of the piles, trying to see if Seagreen Press was buried underneath. It was not here. There were only the usual publications from Suzhou and some of Shanghai’s news, all written in Chinese, as would be expected around these parts.

Had that one issue been a fluke? What kind of publication accidentally delivered a single issue on a fluke?

Something about the incident nagged at Celia incessantly. Rosalind’s last letter said that Seagreen Press’s existence in Shanghai was to cater to its Japanese residents. Up here, outside the city without foreign influence, what purpose would a foreign newspaper serve?

Who was the one keeping these stands in order anyway?

Celia looked up. Along the road, there was a dress shop, a glassware shop, and… ah. A bookstore. She straightened at once and hurried to the shop, pulling her qipao skirt above her ankle before she crossed the threshold. A small bell chimed, signaling her arrival.

“All the deliveries go through the back!” a voice called.

“Good thing I’m not making a delivery,” Celia replied.

An old man popped his head out from the shelves, pushing his thin wire-frame glasses higher up his nose. He returned to the front desk with slow, patient steps.

“Ah, my apologies, xiǎojiě. I have come to expect the delivery cyclist at this time. What can I help you with?”

This was the first time she had come into the bookstore despite the months they had spent undercover around these parts. There was no use making too many local connections when it only increased their chances of being tattled on if the Nationalists came sniffing around. Celia looked around, eyeing the well-kept shelves and neatly dusted ledges. 紅樓書店, the sign above the door read. Red Chamber Bookshop.

“Do you”—Celia pointed over her shoulder to the road outside—“do you run the newspaper stands over there?”

The old man nodded. “Are you looking for something?”

“Sort of.” Celia hesitated, trying to determine how to word her request without sounding odd. “I saw something there the other day. In Japanese? My… my niece is learning the language, so I wanted to fetch it for her.”

For a moment, the old man stroked his beard, looking like he didn’t comprehend what she was talking about. Then he clicked his fingers. “Oh. I remember now. That was a mistake, dear. The delivery person gave me the wrong box. It was supposed to go to another location—I saw newspapers and put them out with the rest without thinking.”

A wrong delivery?

Celia pulled her grocery bag higher onto her shoulder. “Do you know where it was supposed to go instead? It would be useful for me to obtain one.”

“I wouldn’t know but—hey! Li Bao! We’ve got a question for you.”

At the other end of the shop, the back door had been propped open with a cinder block. It made it easy to spot the man—Li Bao—pulling up on a bicycle and tugging his cap off. The old shop owner bustled over, chiding him for being late.

Three baskets hung off the bicycle at different places. They were filled to the brim with packages and smaller boxes.

“A question?” Li Bao barked. He took the toothpick out of his mouth.

“About the misdelivered box.” Celia needed to jump in before the old man could divert the topic with his reprimands about timeliness. “You brought something here that was meant for somewhere else…?”

Understanding lit up in Li Bao’s eyes. “Oh, yes. It was going to Warehouse 34 out on the dirt roads. I brought it to shop number 34 instead.”

The warehouse teeming with Nationalists. The soldiers hauling those crates. There was no doubt about it.

“They were waiting on it too,” Li Bao continued. “Their overseer gave me a whole earful about being irresponsible. Thankfully, I had another box of theirs and it tided them over, but phew.”

“Another box?” Celia asked. “Also newspapers?”

Li Bao put the toothpick back into his mouth. “So many. And they were unpacking it right in front of me, shoving the papers into a different crate that they wanted shipped off that very day. Don’t know what’s wrong with those stuffy military people.”

This didn’t make sense. None of it made sense.

“Kuomintang, right?” she confirmed anyway.

Li Bao gave her a strange look. “Who else?”

Nationalist soldiers were taking Japanese newspaper deliveries, then putting them in other shipments and sending them back out? Why?

Celia inclined her head. “Thank you. This was plenty helpful. I might go inquiring for a copy.”

Before the old man could offer further thoughts, she excused herself and exited the bookstore. She walked back to the photography shop in a daze, mulling and mulling and mulling some more. Millie and Oliver were on shift at the front desk when she walked in through the doors, so deep in thought that she almost tripped on a costumes trunk that had been left out.

“Any good finds?” Millie called.

“Only yellowed qīngcài,” Celia replied. She caught Oliver’s attention, then tilted her head toward the back. Miffed as she was about his handling of the warehouse mystery, she needed his opinion on the latest development. “Help me in the kitchen for a second, Oliver?”

Oliver abandoned the camera he had been fiddling with and followed her promptly. She waited until they were alone in the kitchen, until she had set her bag down on the counter, before she started to speak.

“I need to go back into the city to warn my sister.”

Oliver took the egg carton out. He placed it above the cabinet. “What happened?” he asked evenly.

Celia tried very hard to keep her voice calm. To keep moving, distributing the groceries to their rightful places while she spoke.

“I traced where those Japanese newspapers came from. Seagreen Press? They were supposed to go to that warehouse.” She slid the peppers away. “Oliver, the people behind Seagreen Press are responsible for a series of ongoing killings in Shanghai.”

“I know,” he said easily.

Celia held back her sigh. Of course he did. “You know?”

Oliver made a small grimace. “My brother is your sister’s current mission partner. I found out a few days after their assignment began.”

“He’s what?” Celia leaned on the counter, absorbing the information. This wasn’t relevant to her current concern, but she was caught on it, nonetheless. “I thought they sent Orion in for high-society tasks… and seducing women to divulge if their husbands have Communist sympathies. What’s he doing investigating the Japanese now?”

“He’s well trained for information extraction and fluent in Japanese. I suppose they think he’s the most qualified. It’s Lady Fortune that I’m curious about when it comes to sending agents in. She’s hardly a spy.”

But she is trusted, Celia thought. More trusted—she would guess—than Orion, even if they each had a sibling on the other side. Rosalind had said the Nationalists assigned her with another agent whom she was watching carefully. She just hadn’t clarified who he was. It was so typical of Rosalind to leave his name out; she most definitely thought she was saving Celia from the obligation of reporting to Oliver how his brother was faring.

“Either way,” Celia said, returning from their tangent, “if—and it still remains an if—this warehouse is the very root of a Japanese imperial scheme that the Nationalists have sent my sister and your brother to investigate…”

“… why are their own soldiers at the warehouse?” Oliver finished, a frown pulling at his lips.

Celia shook her bag out, having cleared it of groceries. She let the silence draw long as she folded the fabric into squares, smaller and smaller until it was a little shape that she could put on top of the cabinet.

“How soon can we leave?” she asked.